Quote of the week

“The preparation of humanity for the New Age involves psychological and physical warfare in the form of spectacular crimes and events that, filtered through the IIluminised media, have a ritual occult and initiatory effect on the populace.”
― Robert Livingstone

Indian Point should be “autopsied” Meanwhile: War in Space – Weaponizing the ‘Final Frontier’ and YRTW

The public deserves to know the condition of the reactors still running

Analysis of closed reactors would reveal dangers of those still operating

By Linda Pentz Gunter

The Indian Point reactors have had numerous problems and near-misses. A close look at Unit 2 would inform the safety status of reactors still running — and ought to prompt their shutdown as well, rather than extending the operating licenses to 80 years.

The Indian Point Unit 2 nuclear reactor in New York closes down permanently on April 30 2020. It is a moment replete with good news and golden opportunities that should not be wasted.

As Richard Webster, Legal Director for Riverkeeper, wrote recently in Gotham Gazette, “there will be no problem keeping the lights on when Indian Point closes.” But the question is, with what? Riverkeeper and others have launched a Beyond Indian Point campaign (a good choice of name!) which says that the electricity delivered by Indian Point will be replaced by renewables.

But will, or could be? Despite a ban on fracking in the state, New York still imports fracked gas from Pennsylvania. It is processed at a recently opened giant fracked gas power plant at Wawayanda, just 53 miles from New York City. The plant faced strong local opposition and acts of non-violent civil disobedience, including by actor and Beyond Nuclear supporter, James Cromwell.

There has also been opposition to “A massive, 42-inch, high-pressure gas pipeline [that] was built under the property of Indian Point to carry fracked gas to Canada for export,” posing risks even after Indian Point closes, since its inventory of high-level radioactive waste will remain on site.

So while, even before closing the plant, New York had already made “considerable progress toward replacing Indian Point with demand reduction, additional transmission, and new renewables,” as Webster wrote, Beyond Indian Point has set out to ensure that the Indian Point electricity is indeed replaced by a mix of renewables, energy efficiency and conservation.

Indian Point has been dubbed “Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson.” (Photo: Tony Fischer/Wikimedia Commons)

The Indian Point Energy Center sits on the Hudson River in Westchester County, NY, just 30 miles from New York City. The first of its three reactors closed in 1974. Unit 3 is scheduled to close on April 30, 2021. Both Unit 2 and Unit 3 have suffered a number of technical and safety problems prompting recurring shutdowns. Their closures cannot come soon enough.

But while Indian Point joins a spate of other nuclear plant shutdowns in recent years —including in Vermont, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey — reactor owners elsewhere are demanding massive subsidies to keep their old and decrepit nuclear reactors running. This includes applying for operating license extensions that would see these accidents-waiting-to-happen run for as long as 80 years.

Beyond Nuclear is opposed to the continued operation of commercial nuclear power plants and therefore to any license extensions or new licenses for future reactors (most of the latter remain uneconomical aspirations). We advocate for the phased shutdown of all nuclear power plants given their inherent dangers, health impacts, and the unsolved problem of managing the long-lived high-level radioactive waste they produce.

Nevertheless, while other reactors continue to operate, the Indian Point shutdown — along with its predecessors — delivers another essential opportunity; and that is for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to deny any and all license extension requests for existing nuclear power plants without first materially examining the condition of those closing.

That would mean a close and detailed technical analysis of actual aged components extracted from Indian Point 2 and the other shuttered reactors as they begin the decommissioning process. This would provide scientific information — as opposed to computer modeled conclusions as is the current practice — about the reactor safety margins at the still operating reactors. In other words, “dead” reactors should be autopsied to shed light on the safety status of the “living”.

Needless to say, such a suggestion has thus far fallen on deaf ears. Neither the NRC nor the economically foundering nuclear industry want to see their flimsy safety margins exposed. They do not want the public to know that so far, and from hereon out, catastrophic accidents are averted by luck rather than precaution. They will continue to bury the bodies whole while the diseased operating fleet keeps right on fissioning, potentially to a fatal outcome.

Yet it defies logic, and is frankly irresponsible, to run aging nuclear plants, which were supposed to operate at most for 40 years, as long as 80 years, without knowing precisely how the reactors’ harsh operational environment has affected key safety components that, if they failed, could jeopardize the health and safety of potentially millions of Americans.

Decommissioning provides that opportunity to find out. An autopsy of a closed reactor should be a mandatory procedure before any reactor of the same design continues to operate — indeed whether it is seeking a license extension or not.

There is precedent for reactor autopsy.

In December 2017, a report from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), “Criteria and Planning Guidance for Ex-Plant Harvesting to Support Subsequent License Renewal”, published online, strongly recommended a collaboration between the NRC, the national laboratories and the nuclear industry, to conduct strategically targeted autopsies on the growing number of permanently closed reactors.

A PNNL report recommending reactor “autopsy” mysteriously vanished, then reappeared on line heavily redacted and with the autopsy requirement expunged.

The 2017 PNNL report concluded that uncertainties on the progression of age-related degradation “will require harvesting materials from [decommissioning and operational] reactors” before approving second license applications.

But when, in September 2018, Beyond Nuclear brought the PNNL recommendation to the attention of the NRC during a public meeting, the report was abruptly removed from the national laboratory’s public website and the websites of the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear Information System.

The NRC republished its revised report in March 2019, but only on the NRC website, after expunging many of the references for “required” strategic harvesting during decommissioning, along with numerous references to scientific and technical knowledge “gaps”.

Under the Freedom Of Information Act, Beyond Nuclear has requested that the NRC publicly disclose all communications and rationale relating to deletions and the rewrite of the national laboratory’s contract work.

In the past, the NRC has used the excuse that there simply weren’t enough closed reactors to make an autopsy project worthwhile. Yet, while that is no longer true today, it never really was.

There were several earlier missed opportunities to conduct full autopsies, including in the 1990s at Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts and Trojan in Oregon, where the NRC staff and public interest groups had sought to have base metal samples cut from embrittled reactor pressure vessels. These would then be archived for laboratory analysis to inform operational safety as initial license renewals for 40-60 years were submitted. However, the industry refused, and the vessels were filled with nuclear waste, low-density concrete and buried whole in Barnwell, SC and Hanford, WA.(The above news report describes the failure, shutdown and destruction of the Trojan reactor.)

That should not happen at Indian Point. As Webster points out, amongst the myriad safety flaws that developed at Indian Point, there have been “troubling problems with aging of the bolts that hold the reactors together,” and “the pools at the plant that house spent nuclear fuel have been leaking toxic, radioactive water into the ground since the 1990s, contaminating the local soil and the Hudson River.”

This increases the likelihood that similar such problems exist in other units across the country. It may be too late to bring up the bodies at Yankee Rowe and Trojan, but it is high time we postponed the interments for Indian Point and other reactors until we know precisely what risks their “siblings” — and the public — are facing.

New Mexico – so-called “interim” storage site for highly radioactive nuclear waste given go-ahead by Nuclear Regulatory Commission – and the fight against it continues.

Kevin Kamps is the radioactive waste watchdog for Beyond Nuclear, where he specializes in high-level waste management and transportation; new and existing reactors; decommissioning; Congress watch; climate change; and federal subsidies. Bruce Gagnon is co-founder and coordinator for Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

On April 19, 2020, Bruce took part in the zoominar: War in Space: Weaponizing the ‘Final Frontier.’ I found what he spoke about critical to our understanding of what’s happening in these Covid times, not just on earth, but what the Pentagon and the billionaires are planned for the heavens. This is an excerpt from his talk. Also on the zoominar and of great value were 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳. 𝗗𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝗯, Chair of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK, and 𝗟𝘆𝗻𝗱𝗮 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗲𝗿, an Activist and Science Educator.

War in Space: Weaponizing the ‘Final Frontier’

Webinar bringing together key activists from the US and the UK to discuss the latest news and views on ‘star wars’, missile defence, space weapons, and the on-going campaign to prevent a war in space. 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲: 𝟭𝟳𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬

It’s almost 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ speech proposed the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’ – a ground, air and space -based missile defence systems to prevent a missile strike on the US. Now space is congested with around 2,000 satellites being used by business and the military to extend their global reach. New launches take place almost every day. Elon Musk’s Space X company is setting up a global 5G system from space and has been granted permission to launch another 12,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000, satellites in low Earth orbit in the next few years. There are plans to set up bases on Mars and the Moon and to mine the asteroids for rare metals and minerals. Space has become big business and those business interests are concerned about the safety of their investments.

Therefore, an increasing number of states are now following the US and forming their own “Space Force”. The US, Russia, China and India have already tested anti-satellite weapons. Military space planes and hyper-sonic missiles are being developed for early deployment. Satellites are already integral components of armed drone strikes, global surveillance and eavesdropping, dual use missile defence-offence systems and much more.

One accident or mistake resulting in the loss of a key space component could initiate a nuclear war.

What can we do to keep the heavens clear of weapons?

You can start by withdrawing your support & divest from any of the companies that fund them. Click on the image (below) to see if you do business with any of these companies, organisations & banks & close your accounts.

Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear, contributed to this story. Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and the curator and editor of Beyond Nuclear International.

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Famous Quotes In History

"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology....Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."

-- Bertrand Russell in The Impact of Science on Society

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

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